Realistically, if a couple rich people ever obtain all the money, they no longer have any, because money only has the trait of being money and not merely some piece of metal or paper or information or whatever else when it is used as a medium of exchange, and if almost nobody actually has any, then exchanging it on a meaningful scale is no longer possible.
Under this scenario, one must imagine that people would eventually start growing food and making things on land that they do not “own” and trading it amongst themselves, until some new thing that people actually have access to becomes money. Even hiring security to prevent that ceases to be possible, because paying that security means giving some of that money to someone else, and even if you do that, if theyre the only people getting paid it, then no economic base exists to support things like grocery stores that accept that money anymore, making those security people gain nothing from accepting it and thus have no incentive to do that work for you anymore. For the rich to stay rich, they must leave at least enough money (and resources) in common circulation for the economic system that maintains their power to continue to have relevance.
These billions of dollars are not held in money, but rather held in terms of things which convey control over resources and other people’s lives.
Under this scenario, one must imagine that people would eventually start growing food and making things on land that they do not “own” and trading it amongst themselves, until some new thing that people actually have access to becomes money. Even hiring security to prevent that ceases to be possible, because paying that security means giving some of that money to someone else
Consider the plight of horses following the invention of the automobile. You might think that if the costs of feeding a horse exceeded the value that could be gained by employing its labor and the farmers therefore as rational economic actors no longer provided them with food, they would go into fields regardless of ownership and eat the grass there. But actually what happened with most of them is they were slaughtered and rendered into meat and glue. I’m sure a lot of people found the idea of a bunch of feral horses running around inconvenient, and they control the land and its access, and the horses and their movements, with fences and ropes and such.
There is now effective mass surveillance, there are now drones with guns, and there is automation dramatically reducing the number of people required for most tasks. I don’t think it’s actually the case that maintaining our cooperation, or even our lives, is the only option faced by the very wealthy to retain their power.
It’s not about the money, it’s about what money allowed them to possess. If they get to possess all the lands, all the commodities, all the technologies, all the books, everything (as explicitly said by the character’s dialogue “We have finally given you all of our worldly possessions”, notice how the word “possessions” is used instead of “money”), they’ll still have it even though money isn’t circulating anymore. After all, money is actually their creation to hold what the money was really meant to represent: gold and wealthy. Money was created as a “certificate of gold ownership” in a world that used to use gold as a means of exchange resources. People don’t possess gold anymore, they possess what is promised to be a “certificate of gold”, with gold not having monetary backing anymore due to fractional reserve banking and stock market speculation which together “created” “money” out of thin air without actual value other than “guarantee” from the banks that they’d keep accepting it and circulating it, until they don’t anymore.
That’s why they are investing in robots and automation. Once they have servants programmed within the constraints of their will, servants that (supposedly) won’t turn against them because they’re non-sentient machines, they won’t need “peasants” (as they consider everyone else) anymore.
That’s why they’re investing in flying to the damn Mars. Once they (supposedly) have a new (supposedly livable) settlement far from “peasants”, they can let everyone else die in this scorching Earth that reached this point due to their greedy actions.
money is a proxy for resources, is the thing, having someone “own” everything includes owning all the money, at which point you end up with the same issue. Ownership is meaningless without a system to enforce that, because one person cant prevent everyone else from using “their” stuff on their own, and systems require buy in from a large fraction of the population to function, which requires giving enough people a reason to participate. Automation doesnt really solve this, it increases the total amount that can be produced, meaning you can hold a higher fraction of the total because the smaller fraction left can be “enough” to keep the system running, but some tasks exist that require a significant degree of intelligence and thinking to do, meaning you must either have humans do them, or have machines that are smart and self aware enough that them finding ways around restrictive programming becomes an issue.
I dont think Mars has anything to do with some plan by the rich to escape tbh. Early space colonies by nature would be cramped, form-follows function places to live, and the rich tend to like a lot of comforts. It seems to me more likely that they would send other people to colonize mars as a vanity project, or for resource extraction, or just because they personally like the concept and have enough money to push for it to be done, than that very many of them would personally go there. They might suggest that it could be a way to escape climate change or such in order to try to prompt others to buy in, but that notion falls flat on its face when one considers that even if we burned every scrap of coal in the ground, every drop of oil, and then fired off every nuclear weapon, it would still be easier to build a settlement on earth than one on mars. If you have the resources and the technology to build a mars colony, “the planet burning” is no longer much of a threat to your survival anyway.
EDIT: I guess I should clarify that Im not trying to say that I dont think wealth inequality is an issue, I think its one of the biggest issues we have, I just think this narrative I sometimes see of “The rich all have a long term plot to kill everyone and then fly off into space” looks to me like conspiratorial thinking that overestimates the rich and misunderstands their motives, which I feel is a negative thing, because it makes the solution seem less like “replace or transition the system into one that naturally tends to a more equitable distribution of resources” and more like “These specific guys are the villains, kill/imprison them and it’ll fix everything, and also mistrust automation and space development because they further their plans”. The second of those I think would even if successfully implemented, just result in a new generation of rich people naturally arising later on as wealth begets wealth, while neglecting technologies that I feel are vital for increasing the sum total of human prosperity.
Realistically, if a couple rich people ever obtain all the money, they no longer have any, because money only has the trait of being money and not merely some piece of metal or paper or information or whatever else when it is used as a medium of exchange, and if almost nobody actually has any, then exchanging it on a meaningful scale is no longer possible.
Under this scenario, one must imagine that people would eventually start growing food and making things on land that they do not “own” and trading it amongst themselves, until some new thing that people actually have access to becomes money. Even hiring security to prevent that ceases to be possible, because paying that security means giving some of that money to someone else, and even if you do that, if theyre the only people getting paid it, then no economic base exists to support things like grocery stores that accept that money anymore, making those security people gain nothing from accepting it and thus have no incentive to do that work for you anymore. For the rich to stay rich, they must leave at least enough money (and resources) in common circulation for the economic system that maintains their power to continue to have relevance.
These billions of dollars are not held in money, but rather held in terms of things which convey control over resources and other people’s lives.
Consider the plight of horses following the invention of the automobile. You might think that if the costs of feeding a horse exceeded the value that could be gained by employing its labor and the farmers therefore as rational economic actors no longer provided them with food, they would go into fields regardless of ownership and eat the grass there. But actually what happened with most of them is they were slaughtered and rendered into meat and glue. I’m sure a lot of people found the idea of a bunch of feral horses running around inconvenient, and they control the land and its access, and the horses and their movements, with fences and ropes and such.
There is now effective mass surveillance, there are now drones with guns, and there is automation dramatically reducing the number of people required for most tasks. I don’t think it’s actually the case that maintaining our cooperation, or even our lives, is the only option faced by the very wealthy to retain their power.
It’s not about the money, it’s about what money allowed them to possess. If they get to possess all the lands, all the commodities, all the technologies, all the books, everything (as explicitly said by the character’s dialogue “We have finally given you all of our worldly possessions”, notice how the word “possessions” is used instead of “money”), they’ll still have it even though money isn’t circulating anymore. After all, money is actually their creation to hold what the money was really meant to represent: gold and wealthy. Money was created as a “certificate of gold ownership” in a world that used to use gold as a means of exchange resources. People don’t possess gold anymore, they possess what is promised to be a “certificate of gold”, with gold not having monetary backing anymore due to fractional reserve banking and stock market speculation which together “created” “money” out of thin air without actual value other than “guarantee” from the banks that they’d keep accepting it and circulating it, until they don’t anymore.
That’s why they are investing in robots and automation. Once they have servants programmed within the constraints of their will, servants that (supposedly) won’t turn against them because they’re non-sentient machines, they won’t need “peasants” (as they consider everyone else) anymore.
That’s why they’re investing in flying to the damn Mars. Once they (supposedly) have a new (supposedly livable) settlement far from “peasants”, they can let everyone else die in this scorching Earth that reached this point due to their greedy actions.
money is a proxy for resources, is the thing, having someone “own” everything includes owning all the money, at which point you end up with the same issue. Ownership is meaningless without a system to enforce that, because one person cant prevent everyone else from using “their” stuff on their own, and systems require buy in from a large fraction of the population to function, which requires giving enough people a reason to participate. Automation doesnt really solve this, it increases the total amount that can be produced, meaning you can hold a higher fraction of the total because the smaller fraction left can be “enough” to keep the system running, but some tasks exist that require a significant degree of intelligence and thinking to do, meaning you must either have humans do them, or have machines that are smart and self aware enough that them finding ways around restrictive programming becomes an issue.
I dont think Mars has anything to do with some plan by the rich to escape tbh. Early space colonies by nature would be cramped, form-follows function places to live, and the rich tend to like a lot of comforts. It seems to me more likely that they would send other people to colonize mars as a vanity project, or for resource extraction, or just because they personally like the concept and have enough money to push for it to be done, than that very many of them would personally go there. They might suggest that it could be a way to escape climate change or such in order to try to prompt others to buy in, but that notion falls flat on its face when one considers that even if we burned every scrap of coal in the ground, every drop of oil, and then fired off every nuclear weapon, it would still be easier to build a settlement on earth than one on mars. If you have the resources and the technology to build a mars colony, “the planet burning” is no longer much of a threat to your survival anyway.
EDIT: I guess I should clarify that Im not trying to say that I dont think wealth inequality is an issue, I think its one of the biggest issues we have, I just think this narrative I sometimes see of “The rich all have a long term plot to kill everyone and then fly off into space” looks to me like conspiratorial thinking that overestimates the rich and misunderstands their motives, which I feel is a negative thing, because it makes the solution seem less like “replace or transition the system into one that naturally tends to a more equitable distribution of resources” and more like “These specific guys are the villains, kill/imprison them and it’ll fix everything, and also mistrust automation and space development because they further their plans”. The second of those I think would even if successfully implemented, just result in a new generation of rich people naturally arising later on as wealth begets wealth, while neglecting technologies that I feel are vital for increasing the sum total of human prosperity.